SN Magazine

Technology That Can Help

In “The Race Against Time” in the November 2016 issue of School Nutrition, Kelsey Casselbury walks through how you can beef up your time management techniques. The article advises paying attention to how you spend your time and what your biggest distractions tend to be and offers other tips for rethinking how you approach time management. There were too many great tips to fit in the print article, so we’re including some additional wisdom online.

Here, we explore some tech tools you can try out if you need a little assistance in figuring out where your time goes or keeping yourself on track.

RescueTime ( www.rescuetime.com ): Free for the “Lite” plan, $9/month for premium. Tracks time spent in websites and applications (on mobile and desktop) so you can see what’s distracting you the most, sets goals for productivity, sends a weekly email report and a three-month report history.

Focus Booster( www.focusboosterapp.com ): Free/starter plan, $3/individual plan, $5/professional plan. Uses the Pomodoro Technique (25 minutes of work, followed by a 5-minute break) to help you focus. Saves data in a spreadsheet to see where and how you spent your time.

Microsoft OneNote ( www.onenote.com ): A digital notebook that allows you to make to-do lists, take notes, insert pictures and more. Available with Microsoft Office 365 and as an iPad or iPhone app. A similar tool, Evernote, is available for other smartphone platforms.

Cold Turkey ( www.getcoldturkey.com ): Free/Basic, $25/Pro, $29/Bundle. Blocks an unlimited number of websites (on all browsers!) or apps for a specified amount of time. Available for Mac, Windows or Android.